


Psalm, 2:45 A.M.

by montparnasse



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Getting Back Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 17:53:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13769427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: In 9:34 Dragon, Isabela left Kirkwall with the Tome of Koslun intending to sell it to the highest bidder. Three years later she blew back into town on the freezing midwinter gales.





	Psalm, 2:45 A.M.

**Author's Note:**

> Because I missed them <3
> 
> If anyone spots the Deerhunter reference then I'll owe you something.

As these things tended to it started in the tavern. By that point Isabela had long ago accepted that time kept catching in the same disorienting groove and so she’d been expecting it more or less since she blew back into Kirkwall on westerly winds after a year’s destinationless wandering around the Free Marches, midwinter snow at her heels and the shroud of ten-ton fog hanging over the city like a curse. From the bar as ever she could feel Hawke watching her before she ever saw her, her eyes a glint of black ice, stalking around the back of the room like a bird of prey. Likely she wanted to see Isabela crawl on her fucking belly as if she hadn’t felt every blistering mile of distance like hot coals burning under her feet every sleepless night, at the very twisted guts of every impossible waking dream.

Nothing could ever be certain again, she understood. Then she got up and went up the stairs to her room, pausing around the corner until she heard the unhurried footsteps following a few heartbeats behind her, patiently, patiently.

—

That winter the cold froze so deep it seemed to deafen the city, Lowtown stunned into shrill unbelieving silence underneath the anvil of it; nights the streets were almost entirely empty from Hightown all the way down to the docks as though some horrific plague had swept from the quays through the alleys and the markets and the crooked stairs climbing up to the sheer granite of the Gallows, obliterating everything until Kirkwall became an amnesiac recollection of itself, bled of life. Every night she slept in her long underwear and woke up at least once to build up the fire and by the time she went back to bed the pillow was already cold. By the end of the month she’d spent so much time in the Hanged Man she’d begun to feel like a ghost haunting her own body, shut up in her room and her head and the narrow bed like a hack writer’s madwoman in the attic. Landlocked, strangled in her own sails. There was a song she used to know that went like that, something with flat blue stones in it.

Some nights she picked fights at the bar and woke up in a tangle on the floor of her room bruised and tasting bile rising in the back of her throat; once she woke to Aveline standing over her in the shattering rime of dawn like a wraith after her mothbitten soul. When it was too cold even to venture outside for long she attempted cooking with mostly dismal results or read trashy Orlesian romances with her feet propped up on the chair closest to the fire or wrote long letters she’d never send. Mostly she got dead drunk and woke in bed the next morning with her head throbbing with seemingly all the blood in her body, so heavy it felt like it’d burst if she moved an inch. Then she got sick and started to feel that the gods or the ungods or fate or any number of specters hellbent on vengeance perhaps rightfully had frozen the world over until she did something about her sadsack spiritual languishing, which it was becoming rapidly clear she’d been neglecting for roughly her entire life.

“You’re not _dying_ ,” said Aveline a bit balefully, standing over the fire and stirring some honey into two cups of tea before she brought one of them to Isabela on the bed. “It’s the same old thing that goes around every year. Donnic and I have had it already and it knocked us on our asses for a few days but we’re fine now, and you’ll be fine too.”

“Maybe so but I don’t exactly have your iron constitution, old girl.”

“Maybe if you didn’t drink so much.”

“Or an ass that could crack a walnut.”

“See, you’re feeling better already,” said Aveline. At the height of it before the fever broke over her in a flush of nightmare sweat she thought she told Aveline that she wished she’d met her when she was younger, and then humiliatingly that she wished Aveline was her mother. But Aveline never mentioned it afterwards, so she couldn’t be sure.

Days later when she was well again she put on pants and went to the markets where everyone was huddled around the pitiful fires and bought some sage to burn just in case and brought a bowl of stew up to her room, where she watched the night stretch velvet shadows across the dusty floor until she looked up at the clock and realized she’d been waiting. It had gotten late again while she wasn’t looking. Hawke wasn’t coming.

—

When the woman herself finally showed up again it was during a mild snow flurry preceded by the first weak sunlight Kirkwall had seen in a week, her nose and her cheeks stinging red with cold and her mouth slightly open in surprise, shoulders very rigid, as if she hadn’t expected Isabela to open the door. She immediately launched into a terse explanation about needing some information concerning a shipment of Antivan goods and as Isabela was an old acquaintance of the captain she thought she might come with to persuade him to take on some extra cargo, which she supposed meant that Hawke was running interference for some rogue templar or other, or perhaps a runaway mage. There were new lines around her eyes and nearly a perfect needle-thin streak of grey at her temple; she’d be almost thirty-eight, Isabela remembered. All those years ago she’d been surprised that she herself had only been a year older because Hawke had seemed so much infuriatingly younger than Isabela ever got to be. At first she thought she should hate her for it.

“Don’t mean to be a bitch but I don’t understand what you’re playing at,” she said as they walked the sinews of the streets back to the tavern. Of late she’d caught a handful of people in looking at her in the street or in the shops like they hated her but she didn’t really give a shit, and they didn’t really know anything; no one had been more wrong about her, after all, than she had been herself. “I mean you have to realize this place is eventually going to be ground zero for I don’t even know what. Probably a war. Probably sooner rather than later at this point.”

“And I suppose you plan to be long gone before that happens,” said Hawke.

“I tried getting long gone once before and you see where that got me. It’s like I never left.” Twice now she’d nearly slipped in the places where the guardsmen hadn’t spread sand out over the ice but Hawke caught her roughly by the elbow.

“Oh no,” said Hawke, with that airy falseness Isabela had always hated, “it is very much like you left.”

“Well Hawke, I guess that whenever I need reminding of that I’ll just take a trip up to Hightown to see you.”

“What did you do with it.”

“What did I do with what.”

“The book,” said Hawke, “the source of like, half of everything you’ve ever lied to me about.”

“I gave it to the Orlesians last year,” she said, bitterly. “The ones I stole it from in the first place. They’d been planning to give it back all along. I was going to sell it to a dealer in Val Royeaux, but. What they did with it from there I don’t know and I certainly can’t do anything about it now.”

Very far off a seabird called, the first she’d heard all day, pale and mournful over the frigid slate of the sea. “Why do you always wait so damn long to do the right thing,” asked Hawke. She was looking towards the docks where a scant few workers were unloading a freighter as quickly as they could in the cold; at times in the not-so-distant past Isabela had thought she could feel Hawke’s magic even when she wasn’t doing it, a chord playing in a strange frisson up her spine like spreading hoarfrost. What that meant, she’d never known.

“The way I see it it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what I did or didn’t do by then. They were going to ransack the city, book or no book, me in tow as a prisoner or not. Just like it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you do or don’t do by now—we may both have accelerated things but we’ll probably never know for sure.” Hawke’s mouth was very thin when Isabela turned to look at her and found suddenly that she couldn’t meet her eyes even for a second.

If I waited for you to do anything I’d never have left my fucking room, she was thinking. I’d have been gone six years ago and I wouldn’t have looked for your face in every pub and every street and every letter you never sent me. Hawke didn’t know what she wanted and yet she expected Isabela to read her mind like a prospector with a vein of ore. But then it came to her with the same tidal cyclicality it always did that she was a hypocrite and a liar, and all else aside, she really had no recourse.

“But—Hawke. You’re asking me the wrong question.”

“How’s that?”

“Ask me why I came back,” she said.

“You’re deflecting. Besides I thought you didn’t want to fight.”

“We’re probably overdue for a good screaming row,” said Isabela, “but just, can we please get in out of the cold for once.”

After they got back Isabela stopped at the bar for a drink before the inevitable, but Hawke just went upstairs and and sat on the bed and left the door open, tapping her boot against the floor, waiting on Isabela to come to her.

—

How it went with the Orlesians:

Almost the moment her fingers touched the gilded spine of the book she knew she wouldn’t go to Castillon: he was not, to borrow a phrase, worthy. So she’d gone south, carrying it like a stolen child first to Amaranthine and then to Denerim, then westward to all manner of places strewn like jewels along the Imperial Highway to Montsimmard, where nearly two years into her exile she’d met an old friend who offered to find her a buyer in Val Royeaux. Isabela couldn’t show her face within a hundred miles of the city lest one of Castillon’s people get wind of it, and they would, sure as the fine splitting knife-point of a dagger; she’d agreed to lie low around Val Firmin until they contacted her, and so she rented a room in a boarding house next door to a butcher’s shop and got used to smelling blood every morning and every night.

Then she thought about Hawke. Perhaps this had always been the crux of it, the ineluctable always: she thought about Hawke.

She remembered they’d had a fight, maybe four years previous by that point, something that started down at the docks and ended in the tavern, filling Isabela’s room like a steady expanse of oxygen. She’d told Hawke that she didn’t belong to her, wanting it to wound but also meaning it from her very core of her heart-meat. All her life she’d been someone else’s thing, handed over and over body and soul like a cut of meat at the market; she’d seen her own worth, her weight in gold stacked up on the table the day of her wedding. And then she’d taken it back a thousand times over, daughter of no one, native of nowhere, married only to herself, beholden to nothing but the red swill of blood at her temples, nothing but the ground at her feet. Everything else was extraneous bullshit.

What ever truly belongs to us? Certainly not other people, and certainly not something that was never yours to give. She could not imagine giving herself over to Hawke any more than she could imagine living by this text, any more than she could possess something as inviolable, as incomprehensibly holy as another breathing body, another beating heart. There could be nothing more ruinous. You’d crush them and you wouldn’t even mean to. You’d do it on the way out the door in the mornings or over dinner, you’d leave a lifetime of shrapnel in their soul over the course of a single afternoon. There would be no atonement. The best you could hope for was to wander the face of the earth and come back and beg their forgiveness, that this time you would not squander the totality of their love, or yours.

The point was she never made it anywhere near Val Royeaux.

—

As winter wore on and the days lengthened in slim golden fragments Hawke came around more, and Isabela made a few midnight walks up to Hightown and climbed the weedy trellis overgrown with dead brown morning glories up to Hawke’s window, which was always unlocked. She’d never liked Hightown, which had been the source of more than one recurring argument over the years even though Hawke had never seemed entirely comfortable there herself; it was what her mother had wanted, after all, never really what Hawke or her brother had wanted, and now she had nothing but empty cobwebbed rooms home to no one but the single living ghost whose voice echoed around the rafters like a trapped bird. Isabela had always preferred Merrill’s cramped two-room matchbox in the alienage or the rows of tiny sea-sprayed stucco houses lining the docks to the Amell estate’s vaulted ceilings, and although she tried not to let it show so much these days she knew it still did.

Late in the evenings she watched the city tighten with the cold and the coming dark getting into the shadows and the hush of the sea like the discoloration of an old wound, the low snowclouds and the smoke from the foundries catching the gloaming light with a hellish red glare livid as an evil omen. Occasionally there was birdsong off towards the mountains outside of town. The city had been shaped and unshaped so many times that it felt to her like walking across the warp and weft of time itself, the moving earth beneath her feet like a living relic, erasing itself, drowning everything, gouging itself from the stone again, propagation, consumption, transmutation. Long ago she’d theorized that this was the reason she and Hawke had never really left, and looking out at the deathly spread of the ancient winter city at dusk it seemed proof positive of every indelible and cruel thing she’d ever suspected about them, and about fate.

“Would you _please_ poke the fire around a bit, I’m freezing my tits off,” said Isabela one evening in her room, watching out the window where the snow had dissolved into a cold driving rain rolling in from the sea.

“Did I not buy you a scarf years ago specifically so your tits wouldn’t get cold during these unusually harsh Kirkwall winters,” said Hawke, but indeed she added some wood to the fire.

“I think you told me I could wipe my ass with it for all you cared.”

“That was before.”

“Yes. But you should know I wore it all the damn time.”

“And I also recall asking you to move in with me,” said Hawke, “what’s that been, five years ago now?”

“Hawke.”

“You might actually like it if you tried.”

“Stop trying to fucking guilt me into it, it isn’t going to work. I’d feel like a, I don’t know, your kept woman or something moldering away in the mansion. And has it ever occurred to you that there are very few people who look anything like me in Hightown?”

“There’s Fenris,” said Hawke, in a way that made it quite clear this had not occurred to her until very recently, if at all. “But he doesn’t exactly, well, mingle, I guess.”

“The only reason Fenris is still there is because Aveline makes sure no one asks too many questions and everyone’s scared shitless of him whether they’ll admit it or not. I’d much rather slum it.”

“It’s just. Don’t you ever get tired of,” she gestured around the room, encompassing, Isabela supposed, all of it. “You haven’t got a home.”

Whenever Hawke got started on this it made Isabela want to bash her brains out on the rocks strung along the coast because it would’ve done about as much good as explaining this to her for the nth time, knowing full well it would come up again sooner or later like a slick of oil over water. “Believe it or not some of us aren’t as attached to the idea of home ownership in the rich part of town, or respectability, or climbing whatever ladder it is _this_ week, or like, any number of other things you said you didn’t care about before you stuffed your head up Hightown’s ass.”

Hawke sat down at the end of the bed, firelight in her eyes and her mouth, her hair like spilled ink. Isabela sat at the other end and started working on her bootlaces, and then her pants. “I think my mother thought if she could just get the house back then everything else would fall into place,” said Hawke. “It was always, you know, it was never easy for her but she tried the best she could with what she had. My father wasn’t around a lot and sometimes, listening to her, I don’t know what she thought. Like it was going to be forever in some picturesque vine-covered shack. And of course it wasn’t.” Outside some drunks were arguing already; from across the way Isabela heard someone shout at them out of a window, the shattering cacophony of laughter that followed. “He wasn’t a bad person or anything like that. Or no, maybe he was. But it was always about what _he_ wanted. Sometimes I don’t think my mother ever really got to live.”

“Fathers are worthless, is the way I see it,” said Isabela. “Your mother would’ve been better off with a pile of gold.”

“I’m thirty-eight now and I’m still paying for everyone else’s mistakes,” said Hawke. “Maybe it’s unfair but sometimes I think Carver got the easier end of things.”

Of course you would think that, Isabela didn’t say, running a hand through her loose hair. “I think legacy and all that rot is bullshit. I think you’re better off washing your hands of all of it and reinventing yourself as you please. Better to have possibility, better to have that infinite speculation. Better to take it any way you can.”

At last Hawke turned to look at her. Isabela was already naked on the bed save her necklace and earrings flashing in the flicker-flare of the light as she watched Hawke’s eyes move in an arc across her collarbone to her throat, swallowing. Drawing her hand down her belly Isabela stroked herself, her fingers in the slick velvet just above her clit, watching Hawke watching her, eyes moving again up to her face. “It isn’t that easy.”

“You think I don’t know that.”

“I think you’ve spent a long time lying to me,” said Hawke, her voice like this almost better than a hand between Isabela’s legs but only almost. Between them something passed, expectation or inevitability like foxfire spreading through her blood, through the pulsebeat moving her heart. “But here you are.”

“Here I am,” said Isabela, and then, “What are you going to do about it.”

Their kiss was rough, searing, the wool of Hawke’s shirt scratching at Isabela’s bare arms when she reached her hands underneath and up Hawke’s rib-rungs, trying to pull it off. But Hawke made her wait—Hawke had always made her wait—such that by the time Isabela got her naked she could already feel herself practically dripping wet, yearning stark and heavy in all the wires of her body as she finally leaned down and pressed them together at the chest and the hips, Hawke’s thighs sliding around her waist. They kissed until Isabela tasted blood, Hawke’s knuckles trailing one-two-three-four up Isabela’s slit, her mouth open in surprise; when she pulled back Hawke flowed with her, following, chasing like a magnet.

Watching Hawke sit up with Isabela’s mouth between her legs she looked overwhelmed the way she always did in the thick of it, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it, which Isabela supposed was mirrored on her own face often enough. She traced the hickeys blooming in bright rosebud-bruises along the insides of Hawke’s thighs and at the crease of her ass, two fingertips stroking rhythmic tidal nonsense just barely inside her, feeling the incremental tightening when she drug her tongue around and underneath Hawke’s clit, feeling her thighs start to shake around her. Blood pounding in her ears Isabela kissed her on the dark thatch of hair growing at her pubic bone and then pressed her tongue inside her, feeling Hawke’s fingers thread through the hair at the crown of her skull, deeper, deeper, like a vein of gold in the dark.

“I can feel you,” said Hawke, no breath in it, the bare fragile arch of her back bent in a sharp electric curl under Isabela’s mouth, which was murmuring something hot and runic against her, inside her. Vengefully Isabela sucked her clit and then drug her bottom lip across it, Hawke’s ragged fingernails digging painfully into her shoulder. “Even when you were gone,” she said, “Isabela, I could feel you. Like magic. Like, like my own damn heart.”

“Like a curse,” said Isabela, laughing, covering her, “like a song I could never get out of my fucking head.” Scratch the surface just once and there it was: there was Hawke, and there was Isabela, staring at her out of the glass of a shopfront in Jader, swelling with a lullaby-chorus of waves before a sea storm in Ostwick, waking her from unquiet dreams in the night in a crowded tavern in Verchiel. They did not belong to each other. Rather they had become a part of each other: somewhere along the line they had gotten into each other’s blood, like contagion, like famine, like magic, like history, like desire, like promise, like the very golden filament at the core of her soul.

I love you, she thought she was saying, had been trying to say, she supposed, for a very long time. I loved you when I left and I loved you when I still thought I could be rid of you. When I hated you for what you’d done to me and when I tried to exorcise your voice and your face from my memory I loved you in spite of it all or perhaps because of it. I don’t even know why.

She slipped her thigh between Hawke’s legs and pressed up hard, coaxing, until Hawke moved her hips and then grinded her thigh into Isabela, reaching a hand around and squeezing her ass, pleasure coursing down deep and spreading meltingly up her spine. So many things about the very fabric of them had reshaped by time but there were things still unchanged: the unfamiliar cross-hatched blade scars on Hawke’s upper arm, the way she jolted as though struck by lightning when Isabela stroked the pad of her thumb over her nipple, Hawke’s mouth and then her teeth at the join of her neck and shoulder swallowing the pulse, the shape their bodies made together like a topography of unknown places, of all the things they’d ever lost and found. She snapped her hips and thrust her thigh against Hawke, settling into a smooth percussive rhythm in a way that made her think of current transfer, gasping when Hawke licked her fingers suddenly and slid them down her thigh where Isabela was thrusting against her, dragging them around and then over her wet clit, making her hips stutter.

Trying to stave off coming Isabela kissed her, flicking her tongue between Hawke’s lips, but then Hawke squeezed her breast and pulled back, sucking Isabela’s nipple into her mouth, her eyes watching. She came with a gasp like falling off of something, the molten rush overflowing and spilling inside her as Hawke fucked her through it, the slick silver dissolve racing through the open bloom of her body until she pushed jelly-limbed off of Hawke and finished her off with her mouth, tongue delving into her navel and then around the hard swell of her clit. It took all of thirty seconds before she felt Hawke spasm and clench hard around her fingertips and come, her hand yanking the sheet off one corner of the bed, her eyes wide open and the pulse in her chest running wild and red red red when Isabela finally pressed her mouth to it, teeth bared right over the thick blue vein-line.

All night they slept tangled together with all the blankets pulled up, her fingers dragging soothing nonsense underneath Hawke’s breast, kissing on the mess of pillows. Very late in the night she woke to the sound of sleet knocking gently against the window, the rain having turned to snow again, the fire burnt down to a handful of precious embers glowing like eyes out of the dark, Hawke’s quiet arm snaked so tightly around her waist Isabela thought she must be asleep but for the drumming of her heart beating up and down Isabela’s spine until she could scarcely tell it from her own, compulsion in it, music. Until dawn she stayed like that, listening. Just listening.

—

When it got warm enough that the snowmelt from the Vimmarks began to run off into the Waking Sea they took a trip up the coast during an unseasonably warm afternoon and fucked mostly clothed against the thick rocks in the unreal late winter sunlight, the sea and the humid salt air breathing life into the earth again, the wind rattling the sparse trees like old bones. She sat with Hawke just off the path on the low ledge they’d always favored with a bottle of cheap whiskey, watching the shadowplay of the rocks and the old shipwrecks blur into the waves, the blaze of the sky warming her face and her hands like blood coursing thickly into an atrophied limb. Behind them every so often she got the feeling they were being watched, or that something was moving among the outcropping of stone and thorny brush far up the cliffs, and doubtlessly something was; Isabela only hoped that they got their wish, whatever that was, wherever it was.

“Do you ever think about it,” Hawke asked her. Isabela liked her eyes in this light, their lines, their shadows. “About the years, I mean.”

“Feels like it’s been no time at all,” said Isabela, “but then sometimes it feels like it’s been a hundred years. At least we picked an interesting time to hit this particular wall, if you want to look at it that way. Never been sure if that’s a blessing or a curse.”

“Definitely a curse,” said Hawke.

“You and your fucking morbid dramatics. Can’t it be both.”

“Can’t you just suffer with me for a bit.”

“Sometimes a girl just wants to wallow, sweet thing, I know. But I’m trying to _bask_ right now. Seems more pressing, don’t you think.”

“Is it really asking too much for you to wallow with me just for a bit.”

“What have I been doing with you for the last damn decade,” said Isabela, leaning back into Hawke’s hand in the secret inward curl of her spine, struck by the curious tautology of it, but she was laughing, which she’d also been doing for a decade, or close enough.

—

Winter dug its heels into the stone and hung onto the calcified heart of Kirkwall, stunning everything stupid enough to sprout from the turning earth back into the dreaming dark, back to the sleep that was like death beneath the permanent choking veil of fog. Towards the end of it there was a glut of murders across the city, starting in the Gallows and then fanning out into Hightown and then Lowtown all the way to the sewers below Darktown, although murders deep in the desiccated belly of the city were common enough that most people barely mentioned it, and indeed Hightown couldn’t have cared less. No one could ever determine whether the killings were connected, but for the rest of that bruised and reeling winter a city-wide curfew was imposed for all the good it did, and Isabela spent more than a few nights on Merrill’s floor and nearly a week straight in Hawke’s big bed after being caught out too late, watching odd shapes lurching beneath the streetlights from the windows, waiting out the deathly nights until morning broke and they got up to shake out their days as if nothing had happened.

Noticeably people had started leaving the city. Mostly it was lifelong Kirkwallers, who understood in their blood if nothing else that something was very wrong, as if the city had imparted this brutal wisdom upon the very instant of their birth; Isabela had thought it best not to get involved as it had never been her fight but she’d surprised herself. She sought out amenable captains and merchants and occasionally bribed where she could to get the poorest among them out of town, though what good it would do if the inevitable spread Isabela didn’t know. Sometimes the groaning from the foundries and the sound of the snow running off into the sewers or the needling wind echoing with the strange sounds of the mountains seemed to her a living thing as she stood cradled in the palm of the wise, ancient city, a voice beneath all the other voices, roiling, waking. A drunkard came up to her in the street one afternoon and told her he’d seen demons in the mountain pass outside of town. As winter waned and spring at last approached sludgy and unsweet she began to hear birdcalls at strange hours.

Already she knew she would not leave. She was bound to this place, as she was bound to Hawke, as she was bound to herself, through thick and through thin, i.e. mostly through thin.

“What would you do if I left?” she asked Hawke anyway, late one night at the docks with the sea lapping gently onto the shore, leaving illegible sigils in the sand. They couldn’t sleep on nights like these, she and Hawke, something compelling about the dark draught in Isabela’s room, the turning of the season; the night was uncommonly clear for the late winter dregs of the Free Marches, the scythe moon hanging brittle-bright and murderous high overhead, the thousand stars showing like teeth. Back at the Hanged Man they’d abandoned their card game around midnight and walked towards the shore, where they could see the mountains torn from the backcloth of the night like a painting, and behind them the city, murmuring, moving.

“I’d let you go,” said Hawke, moon in her mouth, “same as before.”

“Just like that?”

“I reckon you’d turn up eventually. Or I would.”

“Is that right,” said Isabela. The wind was carrying in a way that brought a ghost of the city’s nighttime music down to the sea, softer than chalk; she could hear a guitar coming from somewhere, probably from Lowtown, not really dancing music, but on pure impulse she wrapped an arm around Hawke’s neck and moved her hips slowly, circling, holding her close against the cold. “Half the time I expected you to just walk into whatever pub I was getting shitfaced in. So I suppose I’d let you go too. Since it’s probably only ever a matter of time before I see you again.”

“That’s awfully romantic for you.”

“Isn’t it just.” Her hip slid against Hawke’s like flint to tinder as Hawke clasped a hand around her, feeling the pattern they made, like rainwater over stone. “You’re never going to be rid of me.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Oh, a little bit, maybe,” said Isabela. She tugged Hawke closer with her arm around the back of her neck and kissed her, eyes wide open. Then she bit her bottom lip hard enough to bruise. “I think it’s awfully sexy, don’t you?”

Hawke smiled and stroked her hand down Isabela’s hip to her ass and back again, her hand open on the small of her back, their movements long as the shadows on the shore, supple as ribbon. All around the moon upon the city and the sea. “Hideously,” said Hawke. “I like the thought of that. That we’re never going to be finished with each other. That some part of us is always going to be waiting.”

“I can wait you out,” said Isabela. The wind had changed directions. From the mountains she could smell pine and the coming rain, the burn of the city at the precipice of something, dark and irresistible. It smelled like years; it smelled like heartache, like beginning. “Any amount of time, no matter where, no matter how long. I can wait you out.”

Against the stone and the sand their shadows bent like willow branches, dancing, dancing. She couldn’t quite see the line demarcating the convergence of the sea and the sky from where they stood but she could imagine it well enough with her arm around Hawke’s neck, how black the night and how bright the stars, how infinite the prospects. She liked to think of them there on the brim of it, the possibility of it, the thought of falling off the edge of the world with Hawke into the swallowing dark, just out of time, just out of sight.


End file.
